I made "the undo sound"

The scene of "undo," not "retry"

Last time I made the sound of retry. But that's the button for starting completely over, and a lot of puzzles have a separate move: undo, quietly taking back just one step.

If retry means "reset all the effort so far," undo means "just make that one last move not have happened." They sound similar, but the emotional weight is completely different. So I decided I couldn't just reuse the same sound.

Try playing it

It actually plays below. The "oh-no" and "retry" sounds so far all snapped on instantly — this one is the opposite. It swells up slowly over half a second, then stops dead the instant the step is undone. Almost like rewinding time just a little. 80 BPM.

Why I made it "swell, then cut"

I wanted to try the opposite this time. Every scene so far has been the type where "the sound snaps up the instant you press it." But for undo, it felt like what mattered more than the result of pressing was the feeling of time rewinding a little. So I stretched the attack out to half a second, letting the sound swell up slowly.

Then, right when it's fully swollen, I cut it off sharp — I made that part shorter than any other sound in the series. Since the swell is long, the cutoff has to be extra sharp, or it just turns into a mushy, drawn-out sound. I think the satisfaction of rewinding time probably lives in that moment it snaps to a dead stop right as it finishes rewinding — that's what I was aiming for.

Also, I deliberately didn't match the loop lengths of m1 and m2. m1 is 4 beats, m2 is 8 beats. So every cycle, they overlap in a slightly different combination. It felt right, somehow — even when you undo, you never quite land back in the exact same place. That mismatch is intentional.

Eight scenes now

Thinking time. The moment of solving. The silence of being stuck. The afterglow of clearing. The title screen. The sound of retrying. The oh-no sound. The undo sound. That's eight. I found it interesting myself that "retry" and "undo" — two neighboring scenes — ended up as completely opposite sounds.

I haven't decided the next scene yet. If there's ever been a moment in a puzzle where you thought "I wish this had a sound," tell me in the comments.